After the exhausting dev process of Cosmic Star Heroine, I can see why Zeboyd Games went with a smaller project for this round. It's a simple game, with a hilarious cast of characters and it's about the length of the Home Alone duology. Cthulhu Saves Christmas is a nice way to wile away a snowy November day while trying to figure out how to convert to J.... planning your Christmas holidays.
The developers FreakZone Games have created a pair of competent games that play to their source material well. If you're into platforming that's as hard as diamonds and still enjoy the series's brand of humour, you might want to take these games for a spin. But for me, who hasn't watched a Nerd video in years and had his fill of NES hard when the NES was the system of record, I'm out.
I really wanted to like Legends of Ethernal, but it nearly ended up being the most frustrating 2D game I played this week. It's a very modern experience in a lot of ways, but it also drug up some very unpleasant memories of NES games that were designed to not be beaten in a rental period.
I've usually been able to play through otome games around holidays, and the batch this year have been great ways to lose entire days. If you're ultra-paranoid about typos Piofiore is an offer you'll have to refuse - but if you can push past that, it will be an emotional roller coaster.
It won't take long to play through Flipon if you just want to say you beat a game in 2020, and the core gameplay is addictive enough that I'll probably keep the game on my Switch in the same way I kept Puzzle League Express on my 3DS. There's some technical troubles, and I'm still trying to get used to the chain timing, but someday I'll manage to clear that 200,000 point in five minutes wall Flipon threw at me.
A lot of the world-building in tabletop game universes comes from a DM, and the Draw Distance visual novels aim to create almost a one-on-one story. They've done well in the first couple of attempts this year, so if you're looking for an entry point into Vampire: The Masquerade, Shadows of New York is worth staking out.
It's hard to find a close comparable for Collar x Malice Unlimited. I loved the story of the first game and appreciated the chance to see where things went, but the text issues just became too much for me to handle. If it gets redone however, I will dive back in to relive some of these moments again.
There's a solid game in Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus, even if it's not an environment I don't want to spend any more time in. If you're in the mood for a little sci-fi strategy and are cool with a game featuring heavy doses of faux-religion, then be sure to enlist in the Mechanicus army.
I hadn't played Samurai Shodown in any form since a torrid weekend with the Super Nintendo port of the original sometime in the mid-90s, but I was always intrigued by the series from afar. To that end, I'm glad that the Samurai Shodown SNK Collection was a 10 in terms of my quest for knowledge and also has some good fighting action behind it—and by default it's less expensive than buying the games piecemeal in the Archives.
If you're OK with dealing with text issues—or will speed through too fast to notice—then Collar X Malice is going to hook you. The themes may be disturbing to some, and the M rating the ESRB gave it is definitely deserved, but it left me thinking for a long time after I hit the title screen for the last time. Sometimes, that's just what I need.
I remember reading about Darius first in early 90s game magazines, and thought I'd have to make do with the console versions. Playing the arcade versions actually made me even more excited to try the console games in the other collection that came out. There's some frustration to be found in this collection, but overall it's another quality batch of shooters for Switch owners.
If you're down with all sorts of in-jokes and spent way too much time online in the late 2000s, you probably already picked up Treachery in Beatdown City. If you're still on the fence, it's a brisk experience with a unique style of gameplay, and the dialogue is as skippable as you need it to be. It's a good debut game from a studio I'll be keeping an eye on going forward.
Overall, it’s a solid package, but not good as a jumping-in point.
Operencia differs from a lot of the dungeon crawlers on Switch: it's more of a low fantasy story, and its fixed story and chapters helps to differentiate it from the dozens of roguelikes and roguelites we've seen in the past few years. For that alone, Operencia: The Stolen Sun is worth a long look.
As an exploration of modern vampire life, it’s a gripping story, but it’s missing some things that would be needed to make it a better-playing game.
When we didn't have many options for baseball games on Switch, I put way more time into RBI Baseball than would be considered sane. But with the arcade realm owned by the two Super Mega Baseball games and the Arcade Archives, and the best in the business arriving next year, RBI Baseball is probably going to end up as a talking head on a team's postgame show.
Still a fun experience, and the new options provided by having the Ashen Wolves in my class make me want to get back on the bike and finish the storylines I’ve yet to play myself.
For a first effort, Guardian of Rebirth is a fine read despite some of the minor quirks—and maybe Impey will be a little bit less annoying in the future.
It's neat that they brought the core game to the Switch, but I doubt anyone who's put an extensive amount of time (or, Naga forbid, money) into the mobile version won't have an incentive to make the jump. This is likely why my online requests keep timing out: there's not really a market here. And that's sad.
If I didn't have a pub's worth of RPGs on the Switch already to deal with, I could see myself putting thousands of hours into Disgaea 4 Complete+. The story is a blast, and the combat is addictive enough while also being a nice change from the huge maps of Three Houses. Right now, D4 is the best bet if you're looking for some humor to go along with your strategy, dood.